I was just doing random stuff on my phone and went to click a button near the top right of the screen, and was mildly horrified to see "1%", so I immediately put it into the charger, where the phone promptly started showing "0%" for the next ~30 seconds. The phone never died.
Has this happened to any of you?
Yup. Battery percentages are an abstraction over the actual voltage and remaining amp-hours - it's a complex formula which requires calibration and can easily be a bit off.
On one of my first smart phones, after replacing the battery with a much bigger one (both capacity and physically) it would still use the old formula, so it said 100% when halfway charged and after fully charging, during use it would stay near 0 (or at it - can't remember well) for half the actual usable time. I found an app that could show the actual voltage in the notifications, which helped a lot. (When it went under 3.5 or something, I knew it was almost out) But that number also varied with how much power was being drawn, etc.
Yeah, more amps being drawn will cause a larger voltage drop. I got to play around with this with my old vapes that had DNA chips. The software suite allows you to generate battery profiles by discharging the battery over an hour or so at different wattages to get the discharge curve. I even built my own resistor group on a heat sink to run the tests (4x heavy duty 1ohm resistors in parallel)
Not entirely sure if this would apply in your case, but for future reference you can sort of "recalibrate" the battery percentage by:
That generally works when replacing OEM with OEM. But when you replace a 3000 milliamp hour battery with a zero lemon 10,000 milliamp hour pack, Samsung's algorithm just couldn't sort that out.
My old Note 4 ran for years with a giant zero lemon pack It always thought it had about 27 hours worth of life at full charge, but I would constantly get 40 hours plus.
It didn't help that old phone, there seem to be limits to just how much adjustment it can make (including to dying batteries with less capacity also)
I don't like doing that because it wears the battery. Better to have slightly inaccurate percentages than to actively make the long term situation worse
1 up-down cycle doesn't wear the battery, negligible. It would only count if you would do this every day. It's recommended to calibrate a new battery
I was under the impression that's not how LiIon batteries work. Was it a NiCad or some older type?
I think they are referencing how Li-ion batteries just generally have a limited number of charge cycles, so they don't want to waste a whole one.
That's why I asked. I knew about the cycles but I'm not aware of it causing any additional wear. I thought maybe there were new findings recently. I'll have to go look myself, just to satisfy my curiosity.